Globalization is a process that has been going on for the past 5000 years, but it has significantly acclerated since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Elements of globalization include transborder capital, labor, management, news, images, and data flows. The main engines of globalization are the transnational coporations (TNCs), transnational media organizations (TMCs)...From a humanist perspective, globalization entails both positive and negative consequences: it is both narrowing and widening the income gaps among and within nations, intensifying and diminishing political domination, and homogenizing and pluralizing cultural identities. Majid Tehranian
The many meanings of the word "globalization" have accumulated very rapidly, and recently, and the verb, "globalize" is first attested by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. In considering the history of globalization, some authors focus on events since the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, but most scholars and theorists concentrate on the much more recent past.
But long before 1492, people began to link together disparate locations on the globe into extensive systems of communication, migration, and interconnections.
Q: what is global?
A: the expansive interconnectivity of localities -- spanning local sites of everyday social, economic, cultural, and political life -- a phenomenon but also an spatial attribute -- so a global space or geography is a domain of connectivity spanning distances and linking localities to one another, which can be portrayed on maps by lines indicating routes of movement, migration, translation, communication, exchange, etc.
Q: what is globalization?
A: the physical expansion of the geographical domain of the global -- that is, the increase in the scale and volume of global flows -- and the increasing impact of global forces of all kinds on local life. Moments and forces of expansion mark the major turning points and landmarks in the history of globalization
1. The Segmented Trading World of Eurasia, circa 1350
By 1350, networks of trade which involved frequent movements of people, animals, goods, money, and micro-organisms ran from England to China, running down through France and Italy across the Mediterranean to the Levant and Egypt, and then over land across Central Asia (the Silk Road) and along sea lanes down the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Straits of Malacca to the China coast.
The Mongols had done the most to create a political framework for the overland network as attested by both Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. The spread of Muslim trading communities from port to port along the Indian Ocean created a world of sea trade there similar to the world of land routes in Central Asia.
This was a world of commodities (raw goods like cotton, gold, etc) in which merchants concentrated on bringing commodities from one port to another. Rarely did any single merchant network move goods across more than a few segments of any trade route. For instance, few Europeans ventured out of the European parts of the system.
Raw commodities-Spices
The spread of the Black Death in Europe -- which was repeated in waves from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries is evidence that this trading system was a new phenomena because the plague traveled from inland Mongolia and China to Europe by land and sea, lurking in rodents that stowed away on ships, feeding on their food supplies. The epidemics in Europe indicated a relative lack of exposure to the plague (bacillus) before this time-- as high European death rates make it appear that plague was endemic (already common) to the Asian parts of the system thus the spread of the Black Death indicates the relative newness of this trade system.
Origin of an route of Black Death across Asia
The Arab traveler Ibn Battuta (1350) viewed his world in commercial terms (economic terms). At each stop in his journey, he observed everyday commercialism. "Bangala is a vast country, abounding in rice," he says, "and nowhere in the world have I seen any land where prices are lower than there." In Turkestan, "the horses ... are very numerous and the price of them is negligible." He was pleased to see commercial security, as he did during eight months trekking from Goa to Quilon. "I have never seen a safer road than this," he wrote, "for they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner." He also noted that "most of the merchants from Fars and Yemen disembark" at Mangalore, where "pepper and ginger are exceedingly abundant." In 1357, John of Marignola, an emissary to China from Pope Benedict XII, also stopped at Quilon, which he described as "the most famous city in the whole of India, where all the pepper in the world grows."
2. The European Seaborne Empires, 1500-1750
Phase One: the militarization of the sea, 1500-1600
Vasco da Gama rounded Africa in 1498 and forced rulers in the ports in the Indian Ocean system to pay tribute (money) and to allow settlements of Portuguese military seamen who engaged in trade, supported religious conversion, and acquired local lands. They established a loose network of imperial authority over the sea lanes, taxing ships in return for protection.
The militarization of the sea lanes produced a competition for access to ports and for routes of safe transit that certainly. This control put more wealth into the hands of armed European competitors for control of the sea. The Indian Ocean became more like Central Asia in that all routes and sites became militarized. European competition accelerated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Portuguese were joined by the Dutch, French, and British.
Phase Two: early modern world economy, 1600-1800
The commodities trades continued well into the seventeenth century, concentrating on local products from each region of the Eurasian system -- Chinese silk and porcelain, Sumatra spices, Malabar cinnamon and pepper, etc. -- but by the 1600s, long distance trade was more deeply entrenched in the production process. An expansion of commercial production and commodities trades was supported by the arrival into Asia of precious metals from the New World, which came both from the East and West (the Atlantic and Pacific routes -- via Palestine and Iran, and also the Philippines and China).
New practices in Europe after 1500 show the rise of a new kind of global system. In medieval Europe, there was no cotton cloth, and no cotton cloth was produced for export anywhere except in the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean. Europeans began to buy this cloth for export to Europe. They also began to commission (order) cloth of specific types for specific markets (places), and to take loans from local bankers and engage in commodities trades within the Indian Ocean system so as to raise the value of the merchant capital (their goods) that they could re-export to Europe.
By 1700, Europeans invested in trading companies that traveled regularly to Asia on ships (insured and protected by European companies and governments). they would acquire goods produced on commission (by order) for sale and resale within Asian markets. They would return to Europe with cargo of sufficient value to generate substantial profits for investors. Circuits of capital (money/wealth) moved along trade routes, across militarized sea lanes, and organized production of cloth for export in Asia. Asian merchants and bankers also financed (put up money for) the regional trade and worked on European exports.
By 1700, also, competing European powers also controlled the Atlantic Economy; and like cotton from Asia, sugar and tobacco from the Americas arrived in Europe as commodities The Atlantic Commodities System including the capture of native lands in the Americas, forced labor in the silver mines of Peru, the purchase of slaves captured in wars along the African coast, the forced transportation of slaves to the Americas, and the construction of the slave plantation economy in coastal Americas. The volume of the slave trade peaked around 1750.
By 1800, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean systems were connected to one another by the flow of currencies (monies) and commodities (raw goods) and by the operations of the British, French, and Dutch overseas companies (all being controlled, owned, or "chartered" by their respective governments).
The 17-18th centuries were the age of mercantilism, in which state power depended directly on the sponsoring and control of merchant capital, and merchant capital expanded under the direct protection and subsidy of the state treasury. There was a solid bond between Nations and their sponsored merchants and industries.
Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ch'ing empires provided an overland system of economic integration and interconnection that was more expansive than any before. Asian capital, coercive power, and productive energies were dominant in determining economic trends in the Asian parts of the world economy. European activity has long received the bulk of the attention by historians concerned with the integration of the early modern world economy, but from Istanbul to Samarkhand, Cochin, Dhaka, Malacca, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, they were not the most prominent players of economic and political activity until the later nineteenth century. Europeans were dominant only in the Atlantic System in the early eighteenth century.
3. The World Empires of Industrial Capitalism, 1750-1950.
Phase One: the formation of national economies
European imperial control of the Americas was broken by the American Revolutions, first in the north and then the south. This helps cause the rise of capital (money) and capitalists (as opposed to aristocracies) as a force in new order of countries. The purpose of new states (countries) was the political representation of the interests of their own property owners and entrepreneurs. The independence movements in the Americas and revolutions in Haiti and France resulted in new kinds of national territoriality. Governments work for greater control of resources within their boundaries. Thinkers predict a move away from an age of kings and emperors toward an age ruled by peoples and nations.
Next, European imperial expansion shifted into Asia, where military power used by European national states for the protection of their national interests became a new force in the process of capital accumulation. Chartered companies like the English East India Company had a monopoly on the sale of all commodities imported into England from the "East Indies," which included all the land east of Lebanon. This early version of the multi-national corporation expanded its power base in India with government support but without official permission. The British empire expanded by sending British troops out simply to protect the operations of British citizens operating as merchants overseas.
The nation state (modern country) thus became both a mechanism for the control of territory within its own borders and for the expansion of national enterprise (citizens businesses) around the world. The US expanded over land and into Latin America by the expansion of the businesses of its citizens and the protecting expansion of its military power. The British empire expanded into Asia and then Africa, along with the French and Dutch in the same way. "Economic imperialism" was standard practice for economically expansive nation states, and "gun boat diplomacy" became a typical feature of economic transactions among hostile states.
In the 1840s, the British navy forced open the interior of China to British merchant settlements with military victories waged during the Opium Wars to protect the right of British merchants to trade in opium in China; and the US Admiral Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports to American trade. The new nation states national businesses would be pushed forward by national military force if necessary.
Phase Two: world systems of industrial capital
The modern states’ economies set up separate, specialized world regions of agricultural and industrial production. Some regions produced raw materials and agricultural products (mostly the poor southern regions). Other regions specialized in industry (the wealthy industrial northern regions). The result was the creation of regions of the world with their own economic specializations (i.e Latin America as agricultural with cheap labor), integrated into one world system of production. The poor areas produced commodities and the rich areas process them through industry into goods. Next was the construction of a single world of rules and regulations for the operation of this system as seen in the creation of international rules for the operation of national competition at a world scale. This movement in the nineteenth century of setting up of rules/protocols for international business culminates in the treaties of Berlin that organized the partition of Africa (by European states in the 1880s).
This change did not happen over night, but it was clearly moving ahead at the start of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth.
Globalization Since the Fourteenth Century
Source: D. Luddin(abridged and adapted)
The many meanings of the word "globalization" have accumulated very rapidly, and recently, and the verb, "globalize" is first attested by the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1944. In considering the history of globalization, some authors focus on events since the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, but most scholars and theorists concentrate on the much more recent past.
But long before 1492, people began to link together disparate locations on the globe into extensive systems of communication, migration, and interconnections.
1. The Segmented Trading World of Eurasia, circa 1350
By 1350, networks of trade which involved frequent movements of people, animals, goods, money, and micro-organisms ran from England to China, running down through France and Italy across the Mediterranean to the Levant and Egypt, and then over land across Central Asia (the Silk Road) and along sea lanes down the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and through the Straits of Malacca to the China coast.The Mongols had done the most to create a political framework for the overland network as attested by both Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. The spread of Muslim trading communities from port to port along the Indian Ocean created a world of sea trade there similar to the world of land routes in Central Asia.
This was a world of commodities (raw goods like cotton, gold, etc) in which merchants concentrated on bringing commodities from one port to another. Rarely did any single merchant network move goods across more than a few segments of any trade route. For instance, few Europeans ventured out of the European parts of the system.
The spread of the Black Death in Europe -- which was repeated in waves from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries is evidence that this trading system was a new phenomena because the plague traveled from inland Mongolia and China to Europe by land and sea, lurking in rodents that stowed away on ships, feeding on their food supplies. The epidemics in Europe indicated a relative lack of exposure to the plague (bacillus) before this time-- as high European death rates make it appear that plague was endemic (already common) to the Asian parts of the system thus the spread of the Black Death indicates the relative newness of this trade system.
2. The European Seaborne Empires, 1500-1750
Phase One: the militarization of the sea, 1500-1600
Vasco da Gama rounded Africa in 1498 and forced rulers in the ports in the Indian Ocean system to pay tribute (money) and to allow settlements of Portuguese military seamen who engaged in trade, supported religious conversion, and acquired local lands. They established a loose network of imperial authority over the sea lanes, taxing ships in return for protection.
The militarization of the sea lanes produced a competition for access to ports and for routes of safe transit that certainly. This control put more wealth into the hands of armed European competitors for control of the sea. The Indian Ocean became more like Central Asia in that all routes and sites became militarized. European competition accelerated over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Portuguese were joined by the Dutch, French, and British.
Phase Two: early modern world economy, 1600-1800
The commodities trades continued well into the seventeenth century, concentrating on local products from each region of the Eurasian system -- Chinese silk and porcelain, Sumatra spices, Malabar cinnamon and pepper, etc. -- but by the 1600s, long distance trade was more deeply entrenched in the production process. An expansion of commercial production and commodities trades was supported by the arrival into Asia of precious metals from the New World, which came both from the East and West (the Atlantic and Pacific routes -- via Palestine and Iran, and also the Philippines and China).
New practices in Europe after 1500 show the rise of a new kind of global system. In medieval Europe, there was no cotton cloth, and no cotton cloth was produced for export anywhere except in the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean. Europeans began to buy this cloth for export to Europe. They also began to commission (order) cloth of specific types for specific markets (places), and to take loans from local bankers and engage in commodities trades within the Indian Ocean system so as to raise the value of the merchant capital (their goods) that they could re-export to Europe.
By 1700, Europeans invested in trading companies that traveled regularly to Asia on ships (insured and protected by European companies and governments). they would acquire goods produced on commission (by order) for sale and resale within Asian markets. They would return to Europe with cargo of sufficient value to generate substantial profits for investors. Circuits of capital (money/wealth) moved along trade routes, across militarized sea lanes, and organized production of cloth for export in Asia. Asian merchants and bankers also financed (put up money for) the regional trade and worked on European exports.
By 1700, also, competing European powers also controlled the Atlantic Economy; and like cotton from Asia, sugar and tobacco from the Americas arrived in Europe as commodities The Atlantic Commodities System including the capture of native lands in the Americas, forced labor in the silver mines of Peru, the purchase of slaves captured in wars along the African coast, the forced transportation of slaves to the Americas, and the construction of the slave plantation economy in coastal Americas. The volume of the slave trade peaked around 1750.
By 1800, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean systems were connected to one another by the flow of currencies (monies) and commodities (raw goods) and by the operations of the British, French, and Dutch overseas companies (all being controlled, owned, or "chartered" by their respective governments).
The 17-18th centuries were the age of mercantilism, in which state power depended directly on the sponsoring and control of merchant capital, and merchant capital expanded under the direct protection and subsidy of the state treasury. There was a solid bond between Nations and their sponsored merchants and industries.
Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Ch'ing empires provided an overland system of economic integration and interconnection that was more expansive than any before. Asian capital, coercive power, and productive energies were dominant in determining economic trends in the Asian parts of the world economy. European activity has long received the bulk of the attention by historians concerned with the integration of the early modern world economy, but from Istanbul to Samarkhand, Cochin, Dhaka, Malacca, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo, they were not the most prominent players of economic and political activity until the later nineteenth century. Europeans were dominant only in the Atlantic System in the early eighteenth century.
3. The World Empires of Industrial Capitalism, 1750-1950.
Phase One: the formation of national economies
European imperial control of the Americas was broken by the American Revolutions, first in the north and then the south. This helps cause the rise of capital (money) and capitalists (as opposed to aristocracies) as a force in new order of countries. The purpose of new states (countries) was the political representation of the interests of their own property owners and entrepreneurs. The independence movements in the Americas and revolutions in Haiti and France resulted in new kinds of national territoriality. Governments work for greater control of resources within their boundaries. Thinkers predict a move away from an age of kings and emperors toward an age ruled by peoples and nations.
Next, European imperial expansion shifted into Asia, where military power used by European national states for the protection of their national interests became a new force in the process of capital accumulation. Chartered companies like the English East India Company had a monopoly on the sale of all commodities imported into England from the "East Indies," which included all the land east of Lebanon. This early version of the multi-national corporation expanded its power base in India with government support but without official permission. The British empire expanded by sending British troops out simply to protect the operations of British citizens operating as merchants overseas.
The nation state (modern country) thus became both a mechanism for the control of territory within its own borders and for the expansion of national enterprise (citizens businesses) around the world. The US expanded over land and into Latin America by the expansion of the businesses of its citizens and the protecting expansion of its military power. The British empire expanded into Asia and then Africa, along with the French and Dutch in the same way. "Economic imperialism" was standard practice for economically expansive nation states, and "gun boat diplomacy" became a typical feature of economic transactions among hostile states.
In the 1840s, the British navy forced open the interior of China to British merchant settlements with military victories waged during the Opium Wars to protect the right of British merchants to trade in opium in China; and the US Admiral Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports to American trade. The new nation states national businesses would be pushed forward by national military force if necessary.
Phase Two: world systems of industrial capital
The modern states’ economies set up separate, specialized world regions of agricultural and industrial production. Some regions produced raw materials and agricultural products (mostly the poor southern regions). Other regions specialized in industry (the wealthy industrial northern regions). The result was the creation of regions of the world with their own economic specializations (i.e Latin America as agricultural with cheap labor), integrated into one world system of production. The poor areas produced commodities and the rich areas process them through industry into goods. Next was the construction of a single world of rules and regulations for the operation of this system as seen in the creation of international rules for the operation of national competition at a world scale. This movement in the nineteenth century of setting up of rules/protocols for international business culminates in the treaties of Berlin that organized the partition of Africa (by European states in the 1880s).
This change did not happen over night, but it was clearly moving ahead at the start of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth.